The Shocking unimaginable Torture for weeks (to the sound of reciting the Quran…) and murder by a gang of (about) 30 Muslims called the “Barbarians” [with additional “drop in” Muslim friends that happily participated in the torture] of the young french Jew Ilan Halimi (seduced by a Muslim prostitute sent by the gang to get into a trap).

The grisly murder of Ilan Halimi should concern the entire Jewish world.

The highest echelons of the French government — led by President Jacques Chirac and Premier Dominique DeVillepin — went out of their way Thursday night to express sympathy and solidarity with their country’s Jews, following the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi. Their attendance of memorial services at Paris’s Victoire Synagogue for the 23-year-old victim constituted the most unequivocal and authoritative admission that Halimi fell prey to a horrid hate crime.

The knee-jerk inclination of French officialdom, however, was refusal to categorize this as an anti-Semitic homicide. Initially there even was reluctance to note the Jewish identity of the victim.

The discovery of the dying Halimi near rail tracks in the Paris suburb of St. Genevieve on February 13 sent shock waves throughout France. The cell phone salesman was found handcuffed, gagged, battered, slashed and with burns over most of his naked body. He had obviously been tortured to death.

The interrogation of the since-apprehended gang, which abducted and then for three weeks held Halimi for ransom — before, as French police report, dousing him with flammable liquid and setting him alight — indicated that greed wasn’t the sole motive.

A pretty young woman lured Halimi from the store in which he was employed. He was kept naked, bound and hooded, subjected throughout to gruesome torments. The kidnappers, who demanded ransom, were told that the family was far from wealthy. They replied that funds be elicited “from the synagogue,” because “all Jews are rich.” The French-Arab and African-Muslim ringleaders also recited verses from the Koran in their communications with the family.

French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed that the perpetrators “were convinced that ‘Jews have money’… That’s called anti-Semitism by conflation.” He added that four of six persons the same gang attempted to capture were also Jews.

Sarkozy revealed that some suspects possessed extreme Islamic and pro-Palestinian literature and documents. What they confessed to the police further confirmed the apprehension that Halimi was subjected to barbaric abuse because he was a Jew.

The grisly attack came at a time in which some French higher-ups boasted that they had beaten back the anti-Semitic tide that accompanied the 2000 intifada. Indeed the French government oversaw a dramatic drop in anti-Jewish incidents. Reportedly the number of anti-Semitic assaults in France for 2005 is 47% below that of 2004. In this respect the French approach and record is better than that of other European states.

But this clearly isn’t the whole story. Physical attacks are only one expression of the distress experienced by French Jews, many of whom live in close proximity to Muslim immigrants (estimated at 12% of the population). Jewish children in public schools are frequently bullied by Arab classmates. It’s almost impossible to teach the Holocaust in schools with large Arab/Muslim student bodies.

In certain urban French neighborhoods it’s risky for Jews to wear skullcaps. Many French Muslims regard local Jews, their houses of worship and communal institutions fair game in their attempts to wreak vengeance on Israel. This indeed is something for Israelis to ponder. The Jewish state’s enemies often consider all Jews legitimate targets, as the 1994 blast in Buenos Aires’s AMIA Jewish Community Center (which claimed 86 lives) demonstrated on a tragic scale.

France was late in combating the “collective punishment” meted by some Muslims on their Jewish neighbors. It first turned a blind eye to numerous anti-Semitic outbreaks, insisting that “there is no anti-Semitism in France.” Jews were essentially requested not to bother the authorities.

Official downplaying of rampant anti-Semitism between 2000-2003 left deep emotional scars in the Jewish community. The Halimi murder and the initial disinclination to treat it as a hate crime reopened many old wounds. DeVillepin promised “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” about the crime that alarmed France’s Jews. He will have to convince them, but not only them.

Anti-Semitism in Paris isn’t just an internal French matter. It should concern all of us in the Jewish state. We mustn’t be wary of speaking up lest we offend French sensibilities. Ariel Sharon didn’t shrink a few years back from calling on French Jews to make aliya. Our government’s concern over the Halimi murder should be conveyed directly to the French government at the highest levels, and our solidarity more emphatically shown with the embattled French Jewish community.http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/jewishsociety/The_Halimi_Murder.asp

The Murder of Ilan Halimi
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
…Little by little, information emerged about the crime. There were at least fifteen thugs, maybe more. They had used a girl to seduce Halimi into the trap where he was captured. They knew he was a Jew and they had chosen him for that reason. In his pocket they found the phone number of a rabbi and he was the first person they called, telling him: “We have a Jew. The family has to pay. If the family cannot pay, it will be the synagogue.” In succeeding days, they called the rabbi again, howling sentences full of hatred. Later, they called the family, asking for $600,000, before lowering the price to $5,000. They spoke to the mother, to Halimi’s sisters, uncle, and father. When they were not asking for money, they were reciting suras from the Quran. In some of the conversations it was possible to hear Halimi screaming in the background. The thugs sent a videotape showing the young man naked, humiliated, handcuffed, just like on a Zarqawi videos from Iraq. ..
During the last ten weeks, the people who tortured and killed Ilan Halimi had tried unsuccessfully to kidnap four other Jews..http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=609AC68E-E190-4749-A7E8-CF30DF89AF58

… Barbarians seemed an appropriate name. The shocking cruelty inflicted on Halimi seemed to have little to do with efforts to extract money from his anguished family. It evoked the sadistic moral universe of A Clockwork Orange, the novel by Anthony Burgess, with a dose of anti-semitism thrown in.
Thanks to Yalda’s charms, Halimi was imprisoned and tortured with acid and cigarette burns for more than three weeks in the heart of a council estate.More than 30 neighbours in the building knew what was happening but said nothing about the crime, part of a worrying wave of attacks against Jews all over the country.
Besides Yalda, several women have been arrested in an investigation into their role in botched efforts to lure other Jewish men into “honey traps”.

“He wanted a Jew,” a girl called Audrey told police, referring to Youssouf Fofana, the charismatic leader of the Barbarians, who was listed by the girls in their telephone directories as “Youssouf the barbarian”.
His choice of victims was based on two anti-semitic myths: that Jews are all rich and that they stick together. “They’re a big community,” Fofana told Audrey. “United and willing to pay.”http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2114296_2,00.html

The murder of Ilan Halimi-Commentary
by Melanie Philips February 24, 2006

As if the kidnap, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi near Paris wasn’t bad enough, the way it has been dealt with and reported has graphically illustrated what can only be described as a pathological refusal within Europe to acknowledge the fact that French Jews are being attacked and murdered by Muslims in a kind of rolling pogrom. Ilan Halami was a Jew. He was… kidnapped and murdered because he was singled out as a Jew for this fate. A number of recent kidnappings have taken place of which the vast majority of victims have been Jews and their kidnappers Muslims. As Nidra Poller has reported in the Wall Street Journal [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114064452021880485.html]:
…
the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Quran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background. The family has publicly criticized the police for deliberately ignoring the explicit anti-Semitic motives, which were repeatedly expressed and should have dictated an entirely different approach to the case from the start. Police searches have now revealed the presence of Islamist literature in the home of at least one of the gang members. The highest echelons of the French government are now preoccupied with the murder of Ilan Halimi. Paris is well aware that the case threatens France’s international reputation, but far more than that is at stake. Once again, as in the suburban riots of 2005, the country is forced to come face to face with the criminalized, alienated and racist Muslim youth and their adult enablers in its midst. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared, in a long speech delivered at the annual dinner of the CRIF, that this heinous crime was anti-Semitic, and that anti-Semitism is not acceptable in Francehttp://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=236

according to reports in the French press, some of the suspects in police custody said that they tortured Ilan with particular cruelty simply because he was Jewish.
No longer able to deny or play down the racial motive, the investigation is entering a new phase. One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbors, beyond the immediate circle of the gang, who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture.
Ilan’s uncle Rafi Halimi told reporters that the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background. The family has publicly criticized the police for deliberately ignoring the explicit anti-Semitic motives, which were repeatedly expressed and should have dictated an entirely different approach to the case from the start. Police searches have now revealed the presence of Islamist literature in the home of at least one of the gang members.http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008006

Halimi’s recent murder is only now being recognized in France as a racist hate crime. While the delay in such recognition needs to be addressed, the French are finally beginning to acknowledge that such offences are being perpetrated in France and must not be explained away or ignored – for the good of the country as a whole.http://www.infoisrael.net/cgi-local/text.pl?source=4/b/viii/010320061

The story of Ilan Halimi’s murder at the hands of a terrorist gang of French Muslims brings to the surface the various pathologies now converging to make the prospect of annihilating all Jews seem possible to our enemies. First, there are the murderers who took such apparent pleasure and felt such pride in the fact that for 20 days they tortured their Jewish hostage to death.
This makes sense. Anti-Semitism in the Muslim dominated suburbs of Paris and other French cities is all-encompassing. As Nidra Poller related in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, “One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbors, beyond the immediate circle of the gang [of kidnappers], who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture.”
It appears that Ilan Halimi’s murderers had some connection to Hamas. Tuesday, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that police found propaganda published by the Palestinian Charity Committee or the CBSP at the home of one of the suspects. The European Jewish Press reported this week that Israel has alleged that the organization is a front group for Palestinian terrorists and that in August 2003 the US government froze the organization’s US bank accounts, accusing it of links with Hamas.http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395477657&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

There you have it, Quranic [Quran-ic] Torture, Islamic Fascistic hatred, “Palestinian – charity” & Propaganda, all in one case, involving around 30 Muslims, plus “ordinary” 30+ Muslims (neighbours) that knew and said nothing!

______

A Follow-up attack?

Jewish teen tortured in French town where Ilan Halimi was killed
06/03/2008
The incident of brutal abuse began at 10 A.M. on February 22. Mathieu Roumi, 19, whose father is Jewish, was strolling through his neighborhood in the Paris suburb of Bagneux, which has been the site of violent riots by immigrants in the past two years. The suburb became notorious as the scene of Ilan Halimi’s 2006 murder, which horrified France.
…after which they beat him and, with the help of a third friend, dragged him to a dark basement. The three assailants were joined by three other youths, all neighborhood residents and neighbors of Roumi.
For two hours the attackers tortured the young man. One shoved cigarette butts into his mouth, another took issue with Roumi’s Jewish origin, grabbed correction fluid and scrawled “dirty Jew” on his forehead. The six men proceeded to scream at him and threaten that he would die the way Halimi did.
They identified themselves as members of the “Barbarians,” the same gang that kidnapped Halimi from his store, demanded ransom for his release, and when that was not forthcoming, tortured the 23-year-old over the course of three weeks. Moments after he was dumped on the street, Halimi died. …“We admire Youssouf Fofana!” they shouted at him, referring to the leader of the gang that murdered Halimi. Fofana and 29 other suspects are on trial for abduction, torture and murder. If convicted, they can expect a life sentence.
…the six assailants were arrested. Most are in their 20s, two come from Muslim homes…http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961212.html